Data protection is critical to businesses. It has becoming an even more so in light of regulatory compliant requirements. The Security Exchange Commission of the United States recommends business to recover within 24 hours after a system failure. This requirement for disaster recovery and backup drives a demand for advanced data protection technologies. The differentiation in such technologies can be crucial to vendors as well as to customers. Various conventional data protection solutions exist today in the market place, ranging from backup to remote mirroring. Further, many data storage devices and data storage products include data protection features.
A given business solution often comprises integrated software components running on heterogeneous hosts and heterogeneous storage devices. This business solution may use several different types of applications and systems and access several different types of storage devices. There is a significant need to ensure high availability of such business solutions. The existing solutions range from taking frequent backups to remote mirroring. However, conventional technologies do not ensure an application-consistent remote data copy for such a solution. That is, the remote data copies often do not reflect the state of more than one heterogeneous pieces of software precisely coordinated in time across all affected storage resources and hosts. Consequently, the remote copy may be useless, or very difficult and expensive to return to service, if that copy is ever needed.
Although conventional data protection technology has proven to be useful, it would be desirable to present additional improvements. Currently, information technology environments comprise a growing number of solutions that operate across numerous heterogeneous hosts and storage devices. To enable businesses to meet Security Exchange Commission regulations and quickly to recover from system disasters or failures, data protection techniques are required to function across numerous hosts and storage devices. These data protection techniques are further required to ensure an application-consistent remote data copy that allows the entire solution as a whole to be restored after failure.
For example, consider a software infrastructure that supports an integrated supply chain or an extended virtual collaboration among numerous enterprises to provide services to an end customer, such as an auto manufacturer and its parts suppliers and transportation vendors. When a transaction is committed, the commitments of all parties comprising the virtual supply chain are written to persistent storage to represent an application-level consistency point; i.e., a point in time at which a stored set of data is considered consistent for all applications using the data. If the remote data copy does not reflect such a consistency point, that data copy may be useless.
Such application-consistency data protection support requires application participation, yet today there is no replication infrastructure that aids such application coordination. Creating a conventional consistency point in remote or local backup copies is often performed manually or through expensive services. Furthermore, conventional replication or backup technologies are often application-specific and storage device dependent. That is, some conventional technology support may utilize specific application knowledge to generate a consistency point. However, such solutions are often not applicable to other applications. Application internal changes may invalidate the specific technology support altogether. Conventional individual storage devices may provide mirroring capabilities, but there is no “replication infrastructure manager” operating across all these storage devices that can provide overall application consistency.
Some attempts have been made in various mirroring solutions to address different aspects of the above problem. One conventional technology has some support to ensure data consistency from a storage device point of view at the remote site, when the local data is stored across a set of logical unit numbers Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs). A LUN is also used to refer to a logical disk partition. A LUN is essentially a portion of a physical disk. A set of LUNs typically means a set of logical disk partitions.
A conventional approach groups such LUNs so that the write ordering seen at these LUNs can be preserved at the remote site as well. This conventional approach guarantees that the remote copy always corresponds to some consistent point-in-time copy at the local site. However, this conventional approach does not guarantee application level consistency if the application runs across numerous such storage devices. If replication is performed at a storage virtualization layer, this conventional approach can potentially deal with the issue of operating with numerous heterogeneous storage boxes. However, there is still a need for this conventional approach to coordinate with applications to form a consistency point.
Therefore, there remains a need for an efficient and low-cost data protection method to provide application level consistency for remote data copies in a system comprising heterogeneous hosts or heterogeneous storage devices. What is therefore needed is a system, a computer program product, and an associated method for creating an application-consistent remote copy of data using remote mirroring. The need for such a solution has heretofore remained unsatisfied.